Unpleasantness

It’s one of the areas of working in IT, specifically on the helpdesk, that no one ever prepares you for. They don’t cover it in the tech magazines, they don’t talk about it on tech podcasts, and you don’t hear much about it when you’re training for your career, but at some point, you will have to do it. You will be asked to look into something, and figure out why something doesn’t work, and you’ll discover what it is, and then you’ll have to fix it.

Fixing it will involve taking that information and presenting it to the one person you don’t want to. You will have to go talk to a coworker, one you like and get along with, one who works as hard as anyone you’ve ever known, and you will have to tell them that they made a mistake.

You will have to look someone dead in the eye, who has poured their heart and soul into a project, and tell them they did it wrong.

It sucks.

But then, you get to help them correct the problem, you get to work side by side with them, guiding them to learning how not to make the same mistake again, and if you’re really good, you get to help turn their mistake into a minor problem and a thing of the past, quickly.

That doesn’t suck.

Technorati tags: Mistakes, Helpdesk

Similar Posts

  • Wrapup

    Updates on my week so far: Mac is still crashing. More graphics work has been lost. Possibly going to work exclusively booted into OS 9 for now. (It can’t hurt at this point..) Massive amounts of research done (Thanks to Google) to show that a company has made deceptive, if not outright false, statements to…

  • Even Younger Employees Come In With a Skills Gap

    One of the things I have talked about for years regarding college education is that, by its nature, it will always be behind. Think about it. You start a four-year degree program to learn technology skills. By the time you complete the four years and maybe even an advanced degree, everything you’ve learned is outdated. Technology changes that quickly. You enter a workplace using the next versions of everything you know. A version you don’t know much about because it’s so new that college programs haven’t even started incorporating it yet.

    And by “so new,” I’m saying it’s been updated within the last few years.

  • This Week’s Links (weekly)

    Lead up tags: Management MM Probative Value Versus Burden: eDiscovery Of Metadata tags: LitSupport MM Are Your Training “Virtually” Blind? tags: training MM Work Smarter Not Harder tags: LitSupport MM An In-House Perspective on Taking Greater Control of the E-Discovery Process tags: LitSupport MM Skip the HASH When Deduping Outlook MSG Files tags: LitSupport MM…

  • What I’m Sharing (weekly)

    Why Blog? Legal Bloggers Share their Stories The tsunami of legal work and e-discovery work to come Zoom tips for the modern age No Going Back The global pandemic will shift how courts administer justice New Google Assistant feature turns the entire internet into your personal audio book How to Lead Your Team Through Tough…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)